Two different forces drive the necessity for advanced management of such assets:
- Large number: even smaller sites tend to produce large numbers of assets, often stored in random folders and with incoherent naming, making the organization and overview increasingly hard over time. Digital asset management adds a meta-layer of information to every file in a semi-automatic indexing process, allowing users to search for attributes in a database associated with the files.
- Automated retrieval: assets as building blocks for content often are used to produce automated output, like image galleries and download areas. Digital asset management serves these output functions by providing an interface for retrieving assets filtered by any combination of meta data criteria.
The DAM is similar to the File module integrated into the TYPO3 backend as a main module. It will replace the File module when finished, which means all file handling like copying, deletion and renaming of files is provided by the DAM. Nevertheless the DAM does not use a new storage type for files. The files are stored into the file system as before.
DAM 1.1 Finally the new version is here due to the work of many people. We said 1.1 would be a christmas present and it was. Thanks Uschi Renziehausen for all your testing, suggestions, enthousiasm. Keep up the good work! Karma points all the way for you ;-) Thanks Stanislas Roland for your communication with the DAM team and especially Uschi and for your work on DAM integration in RTEhtmlarea. Muchios Gracias Dan Osipov for numerous bugfixes and adding the docheaders to DAM. Really looking forward to the next steps we are planning. Thanks David Steeb for integrating folders to categories. Thanks Benni Mack for some initial work and fixes along the way. We are still waiting for your mass uploader for DAM ;-) Thanks Georg Kuehnberger for being there from the start. And thanks to all <link http: forge.typo3.org wiki extension-dam sponsoring>sponsors that have been so willing to pay for most of the work Stanislas Roland did. Owww and Stanislas tHNx for spending much more time then you anticipated. Will there ever be a project that is finished in time ;-). Last but not least thanks Michiel Roos from Netcreators for keeping DAM alive!
Three extensions have been released that are needed for DAM (dam, dam_catedit and dam_index). At a later stage these extension will be merged into one extension. In the new year we will also release dam_ttcontent that also holds fixes for workspaces done by Ingo Renner.
Bugs Fixed What bugs were fixed? Well, a lot of bugs were fixed. Please see the <link http: forge.typo3.org repositories entry extension-dam dam tags dam_1-1-0 changelog>ChangeLog for a complete list.
Thanks Very special thanks goes out to Rene Fritz whose brainchild DAM is. Thank you Daniel Hinderink. For the record Daniel, Rene and Ben van 't Ende started out braining about DAM way back in like 2003.
The Future We are no there yet. We need you to test DAM 1.1, report bugs, add feature requests, add patches and sponsor. We rely on your sponsoring. Many of us can do this work in our spare time, but some of us also need to earn a living from the work we do. Links
- <link http: typo3.org extensions repository view dam current>Extension download
- <link http: forge.typo3.org projects show extension-dam>DAM development
Happy New Year everybody from the DAM development team.